Not necessarily about books or coffee.

“We see only its light, not its shadows.”

After archly proclaiming in my last entry that “31 feels as though changes are afoot. It certainly feels better than the uncertainty of 21,” this week I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m either psychic or stupid, or both. This week has been nothing but strife and change – hopefully for the better in the long term, but right now it doesn’t feel like that. I’d really rather just run away and not have to cope with any of it, or else be passive enough to just sit back and let the winds blow where they etc. But I’m not that passive of a person, and there is a lot to sort out, and now I have to grit my teeth and try to make the right decisions and be selfish enough to try and end up happy without letting the fallout hurt people too much. Vaguebook much? Don’t worry, I’m really, really fine.

So, now that I’ve come dangerously close to actually bringing up my personal life, let’s move on to the fun things. I totally have a social life, so I’m writing this on Friday evening after spending a few hours working on the fun shadow puppet film that I’m planning to make this year.

Based on a short story, we’ve (by which I mean me and Coffee Monster) been alternating between script and storyboarding, because what with the lighting and set-up, the two go hand in hand. It’s taken us all evening to get about one-sixth of the story sorted.

Things I have learnt this evening:

Shadow puppet storyboarding is fun, because you get to scribble light sources and light direction in yellow crayon all over the beautifully drawn stick men.

Drawing in the shadows results in quite a lot of blobs that we probably won’t be able to recognise tomorrow morning.

Coffee Monster is better at drawing storyboard panels than I am, but I’ve done most of the pictures so far, so the pages look like a mad toddler attacked them (six-wheeled car, anyone?) and then an adult had to carefully label what things are supposed to be afterwards.

You can dismiss an awful lot of issues with the words, ‘but this is a rough draft – we’ll worry about that later’.

You can also be massively ambitious about what you’re planning to do with a cardboard cut-out and and a shower curtain hung over a book case: “Then the light will sort of swerve out this way and the rain drops will fall down and there will be a full disco complete with cantina band!”

There’s a bit on our storyboard template for production name – so immediately every awesome name I ever had for a production company leapt out of my head this evening and ran out of the window, never to return.

The lack of production company name bothered me far more than actually starting the work for a while there.

The score from Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow makes good atmospheric music for a spooky project.

From a distance the pages still look pretty good.

So that’s all good.

And I’ll leave you with the link to this poem, which was tweeted by Bookslut earlier today and which is so fitting for my current mood and situation that it would be funny if I had any kind of sense of humour.